The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

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Friday, June 20, 2014

These crises have fostered on the
part of the Muslim Brotherhood and its followers a reluctance to
examine any internal causes for their malaise, and has created a culture
of denial that by now is part of the Muslim culture and history. It
makes us Muslims refuse to take responsibility for our role in history,
leading to a pathological proclivity to blame others -- especially the
Jews -- for misfortunes that are really of our own making.The idea that the sins of one generation, or one individual, might be
visited upon another is explicitly rejected in the Quran by the
following words: "And no bearer of burdens shall be made to bear
another's burdens." [35:18] Muslims who accept the idea of abrogation
use this for their own narrow, or bigoted, interests that neither their
own logic not the universal message of the Quran warrants.Just as a few drops of lemon juice curdle a bowl of milk, so
Judeophobia sanctioned by the Quran and the Prophet would mean that
Islam as a religion of mercy is a falsehood. Mercy is, in fact, the most
important of the many attributes of Allah (God) referred to by Muslims.
That Islamists have proven to be most unmerciful illustrates just how
far they have strayed from God's message as revealed in the Quran.Islamists have shredded their "thin veneer of Islam" and displayed
their "jihad" as a neo-pagan belief in a capricious tribal god governing
a cult of violence. It was from such a pagan belief that Muhammad
sought to lift the Arabs of the desert by having Islam bear the
universal message of belief in one God, merciful and compassionate; but
it is precisely this pagan cult of tribal violence that Islamists have
resurrected or which , it might be said, they never really renounced.

"In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is non-theological." — Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam.

The contemporary resurgence of post-Shoah anti-Semitism in Europe is an indisputable reality.1
It rides on, or is fuelled by, the even more menacing spread of global
Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism – driven by anti-Jew and anti-Israeli
hatred, packaged as religiously sanctioned by clerics. These include
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood from Egypt, and the clerically based political leadership of
the Islamic Republic in Iran. Discussing it, therefore, requires
questioning to what extent it is traceable to the Quran and the life of
Muhammad, and to what extent it is imported from the West and
symptomatic of the deep-seated civilizational crisis within the Muslim
world.

The
role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as Hitler's
collaborator in importing European anti-Semitism into the Middle East,
is well documented.

There are a number of reasons why it is important to examine whether the Quran and the Sira
(the biographical literature on the Prophet) sanction Islamic bigotry
towards the Jews. If they do, there is no reprieve from the cycle of
Islamic Judeophobia. It would then follow that any relationship with
Israel and Israelis based on mutual respect and interest, as sought by
the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, is forbidden from a Muslim
perspective. It would also follow that opposition to Muslim
anti-Semitism by Jews, Christians, other non-Muslims and even by other
Muslims invariably would lead to a conflict with more or less the
entirety of Islam.If one assumes, however, that Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is a modern
phenomenon, attempts by Muslims to legitimize the politics and culture
of hate by citing the Quran or the traditions of the Prophet are not
merely misguided, but constitute an abuse of Islam and its sacred texts.When non-Muslims, including Jews, give credence to Muslim
hate-mongers – whose derogatory views purportedly derive from the Quran
and the biography of the Prophet – they are ironically reinforcing
Muslim anti-Semitism.A text is open to many readings, and the Quran continues to be
interpreted by Muslims differently. This is why the history of Islam,
like that of Judaism and Christianity, is paved with many sects and
schools of thought. When someone insists on a particular reading, he is
seeking to impose his reading, often coercively, on others. This is what
"official" Islam – that of the Muslim states represented by the OIC in
international forums or the UN – has been trying to do, including to
those Muslims, such as I, who reject its interpretation.This is how the struggle for reform begins and continues. The Sufis
in Islam do not accept the coercively authoritative reading of the Quran
by those who hold political power in the name of Islam and who seek to
bend God's Word to their own narrow interests as do, for instance, the
Wahhabi rulers of Saudi Arabia. Remember, reading the Bible was one of
the triggers of the struggle Martin Luther initiated as he declared
defiantly, "Here I stand." In other words, the stand he took was in
reading and interpreting the Bible according to his intelligence and
conscience – contrary to that of the Vatican.Many others in Islam also read the sacred texts of Islam contrary to
the reading of Islam's sacred text by Muslim bigots. These independent
readers include the late president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, also
a genuine friend of Jews and Israelis.The quelling of Muslim hate-mongers is inseparable from advancing
modernist reform of Islam, and this is why non-Muslims are mistaken when
they make allowances for the thesis of Arab and Muslim anti-Semites, or
agree with them, that Islam obliges Muslims to vilify and fight the
Jews as enemies of Allah.Robert Wistrich has rightly called Muslim anti-Semites "a clear and present danger."2
He has painstakingly described the characterizations of the Jews by
Muslims. Those most forceful in spewing their bigotry against the Jews
are Palestinian Arabs and their religious, political and intellectual
leaders.3 The role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin
al-Husseini, as Hitler's collaborator in importing European
anti-Semitism into the Middle East, is well documented.4 The
Mufti's ideology and politics have never been openly or publicly
disavowed by Palestinians, or by religious and political leaders among
Arabs or Muslims in general. To the contrary, the Mufti's ideology of
hate-mongering against the Jews and the Zionist project has been
emulated by an array of other leading Arab and Muslim intellectuals,
activists, and religious leaders, including Hasan al-Banna, the founder
of the Muslim Brotherhood; Syed Qutb, the intellectual heavyweight of
the Muslim Brothers; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas; the
rulers, religious leaders and imams of Saudi Arabia; the clerics of
al-Azhar, the most renowned and prestigious Sunni Muslim religious
institution, in Cairo; Abul A'la Mawdudi, the Indo-Pakistani founder of
the Jamaat-i-Islami; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian architect
of the Islamic Republic with its current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei and, notably, the former presidents Akbar Rafsanjani and
Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; the leaders of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, the popular Egyptian cleric who appears on Al Jazeera; the
leadership and ranks of al Qaeda and other "jihadi" (holy war)
organizations, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan; and
non-clerical or secular Muslim leaders like Mahathir Mohamad, the former
prime minister of Malaysia. Clearly, the front of Muslim anti-Semitism
is wide and deep.It might be supposed that so many prominent Muslims cannot all be
wrong in insisting that their hatred for Jews, Zionists and Israel is
sanctioned by Islam. Yet history is filled with examples of errant
religious and political beliefs, which ultimately have led to unpleasant
consequences. Islamic history, too, bears testimony to the wrongs
committed by Muslims – wrongs for which they have suffered grievously.

i.

From the earliest years of Islam, the relationship between Muslims
and Jews has been marked by ugly quarrels. Muhammad's engagement with
the Jews of Arabia – those settled in Yathrib (which would come to be
known as Medina) – culminated in their massacre and expulsion. There are
references to this in the Quran and in the earliest biography of the
Prophet. One must nevertheless ask if these references are evidence of
the built-in hostility towards Jews that Muslim hate-mongers employ to
sanctify their vilification of the Jews. According to the expert on
extremism, Dr. Neil Kressel,

The problem goes way beyond the Nazi-like rants of
extremist clerics. And far from being a by-product of the Arab-Israeli
conflict, Jew hatred has roots in the long history and complex theology
of Islam.5

In expanding his thesis, Kressel points to Sheikh Mohamed Sayyid
Tantawi – the former Grand Imam and rector of al-Azhar University, who
died in 2010 – as an example of a contemporary Muslim anti-Semite who
validated his bigotry by appealing to traditional Muslim Judeophobia
based on negative references to the Jews in the Quran and the traditions
of the Prophet. Tantawi, who promoted interfaith meetings with
Christian and Jewish religious leaders, was viewed by many as a liberal
Muslim reformer. From his position of influence, he did condemn
suicide-bombings after 9/11; defend the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty
signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin; denounce female circumcision, common in Egypt; and
support the ban on niqab [the full face cover worn by some Muslim
women]. But when it came to the Jews and Israel, Tantawi revealed an
anti-Semitism masked as the traditional Muslim Judeophobia prevalent
across the Muslim world. As Kressel notes:

His [Tantawi's] doctoral dissertation, written in 1969,
disparaged Jews with an abundance of quotations from the Quran and other
religious sources. In this lengthy theological work, he detailed the
Jews' supposedly evil ways and how they purportedly endeavored to entrap
the Muslims during Muhammad's era. Tantawi's reading of the Quran
ascribes to the Jews a slew of unflattering characteristics, including
wanton envy, lasciviousness, religious fanaticism, murderousness, and a
tendency toward "semantic bickering." Jews, collectively, are accused of
corrupting Allah's word, consuming the people's wealth, and most
ominously, murdering Allah's prophets.6

Kressel then observes, "Even if one assumes that the Quranic text
offers some basis for Tantawi's inferences, a true religious moderate
might have argued that the verses in question apply only to particular
Jews living in Muhammad's day."7 Tantawi did not. Instead, in
a sermon delivered in April 2002, he called the Jews "the enemies of
Allah, descendants of apes and pigs."8 This phrase refers to a
verse in the Quran (2: 65), and it is commonly deployed by Muslim
hate-mongers against the Jews and Israelis.Wistrich observes that the depiction of the Jews as loathsome by Tantawi, Khomeini9,
or Syed Qutb is made "not simply to morally delegitimize Israel as a
Jewish state and a national identity in the Middle East, but to
dehumanize Judaism and the Jewish people as such."10According to Bassam Tibi, such references to the Quran and early
Muslim history facilitated the Islamization of European anti-Semitism.11
In Tibi's view, this could occur because Judeophobia was present in
early Islamic history, just as it was in early European history.
Genocidal anti-Semitism, however, writes Tibi, is "a specifically
European, primarily German, disease that never existed in Islam before
the twentieth century."12Wistrich similarly observes,

The persistence, integrity, and depth of this hatred
should not blind us, however, to the fact that, historically speaking,
anti-Semitism is a relatively new phenomenon in Arab culture and among
Muslims in general. It did not exist as a significant force in the
traditional Islamic world, although, as we shall see, some of the seeds
of contemporary anti-Jewish attitudes can be found in the Koran and
other early Islamic sources.13

Antagonism towards the Jews among Christians and Muslims in the
pre-modern world was common. Both Christians and Muslims used their
faith-based traditions to justify their Judeophobia.Despite this commonality, however, the scholar Bernard Lewis has
argued that a distinction needs to be made between Christians and
Muslims in their attitudes toward the Jews. According to Lewis,

The story of a golden age of complete equality is, of
course, nonsense. No such thing was possible or even conceivable.
Indeed, among Christians and Muslims alike, giving equal rights or, more
precisely, equal opportunities to unbelievers would have been seen not
as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. But until fairly modern times
there was a much higher degree of tolerance in most of the Islamic lands
than prevailed in the Christian world. For centuries, in most of Europe
Christians were very busy persecuting each other; in their spare time,
they were persecuting Jews and expelling Muslims – all at a time when,
in the Ottoman Empire and some other Islamic states, Jews and several
varieties of Christians were living side by side fairly freely and
comfortably.14

The fusion of traditional Muslim Judeophobia and fierce European
anti-Semitism occurred before the rise of Nazi Germany, when the entire
corpus of Russian and German anti-Semitism, from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion
to the support for Hitler's policy of extermination of the Jews, was
imported to the Middle East. These were the years between the World
Wars, when the victors of World War I were precariously positioned in
the Middle East as the "Mandatory" powers, in the terminology of the
League of Nations, while the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire
restlessly aspired to their own independence and statehood.When the Caliphate of the Ottoman Turks was abolished in 1924 by
Mustapha Kemal (Atatürk) and his supporters, and was reconstituted as a
modern republican state, an entirely new problem arose for Muslims. The
abolition of the Caliphate by the Turkish leader meant that Muslims were
faced with the problem not only of how to acquire eventual independence
from European colonial rule, but also of how to restore the Caliphate
in some form or other, to create a Shariah-based, Islamic state. These
questions became the distinguishing features of political Islam, or
Islamism, and the ideology of political movements such as the Muslim
Brotherhood.The Muslim distress that spread over the long decline of Islamic rule
and the loss of lands to European powers turned greater, especially
among Arabs, in the twentieth century, following several events. The
first was the suggested partition of Palestine, to which the Arabs never
agreed. Then came the establishment of the state of Israel, and the
repeated defeats suffered by Arabs in their wars against the Jews. Arabs
and Muslims view this history as insufferable and deeply humiliating –
bitter feelings that find expression in the vilest denunciation of the
Jews as enemies of Islam and Muslims. As Bernard Lewis wrote,

Why then this special anger in the Muslim response to the
end of Palestine and the birth of Israel? Part of this is certainly due
to its position, in the very center of the Arab core of the Islamic
world, and to its inclusion of the city of Jerusalem, which – after long
and sometimes bitter disputes – was finally recognized as the third
Holy City of Islam after Mecca and Medina. But most of all, the sense of
outrage, as is clearly shown in countless speeches and writings, was
aroused by the identity of those who inflicted these dramatic defeats on
Muslim and Arab armies and imposed their rule on Muslim Arab
populations. The victors were not the followers of a world religion or
the armies of a mighty imperial power, by which one could be conquered
without undue shame – not the Catholic kings of Spain, not the far-flung
British Empire, not the immense and ruthless might of Russia – but the
Jews, few, scattered, and powerless, whose previous humility made their
triumphs especially humiliating.15

This recent history partly explains the nature of contemporary Arab
and Muslim anti-Semitism, and why it continues to be ratcheted up in
inverse relation to the repeated failures by Arabs to defeat Israel. It
is also aggravated by the continuing discord over the nature of Islamic
society; by the general economic, political, and cultural malaise across
the Muslim world; by the Muslim Brotherhood and its legions of Islamist
followers' discrediting secular-nationalist regimes; and by sectarian
conflicts that have spilled over into civil war across the Middle East
and beyond, into the wider Muslim world.These crises have fostered an unwillingness on the part of the Muslim
Brotherhood and its legions of Islamist followers to examine any
internal causes for their malaise, and has created a culture of denial
that by now is a part of Muslim culture and history. It makes us Muslims
refuse to take responsibility for our own role in history, and leads to
a pathological proclivity to blame others – especially the Jews – for
misfortunes that are really of our own making.While Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism might be explained as symptomatic of Islamic civilization in disarray, what is not
explained, and possibly cannot be explained, is Muslim bigotry against
the Jews on the basis of Islam. If the argument that the Quran and the
Prophet sanction Muslim Judeophobia is true, as Muslim hate-mongers
insist, then what logically follows is unavoidable: Just as a few drops
of lemon juice curdle a bowl of milk, Judeophobia sanctioned by the
Quran and the Prophet would mean that Islam as a religion of mercy is a
falsehood.As a Muslim, I recoil at this thought, as should any Muslim
reflecting upon the fallacy of the argument that those few references in
the Quran about some Jews, or a segment of the Jewish population with
whom Muhammad had a bitter encounter, can be read – as Muslim
hate-mongers have done and continue to do – as divine wrath directed
towards all the Jews until the end of time; and that it is incumbent
upon Muslims to fight them as enemies of God. Such a reading of the
Quran is plainly wrong and indefensible.How, then, should the Quranic references to the Jews be read so as to
be consistent with the Quran's overall message Muslims believe is a
sign of God's mercy for mankind? Repeatedly, the Quran reminds those
Muslims who take it as the Word of God that God is "ever merciful and
ever compassionate" – included in the invocation with which every surah
or chapter of the Quran's 114 chapters, except one, begins."Mercy," is in fact, the most important of the many attributes of
Allah (God) referred to by Muslims. That Islamists have proven to be
most unmerciful illustrates just how far they have strayed from God's
message as revealed in the Quran.The Quran is also the testimony and record of Muhammad's life. The
few biographical references to him constitute both the bare outline and
the core narrative of what were later embroidered and embellished by
biographers. Volumes of oral reports about the Prophet, most of which
were written down many years after his death, may well be unreliable or
of dubious merit. If Shakespeare's life remains contested despite the
proximity of his age to ours, it is of no surprise that what we know of
the Prophet with any degree of certainty is very little, given the
distance in time and the fact that the Arabs of the desert, among whom
he lived, are scarcely even mentioned in recorded history.16
The Quran is the most authentic source of the little we know about the
Prophet, and vouchsafes the Muslim belief that the way he conducted his
affairs and lived his life was consistent with the directives given to
him as revealed there.If non-Muslims do not agree with this argument, there is nothing more
to be said to them; they can go ahead and deal with the Islamists and
their bloody-mindedness as they have been doing, and the cycles of war
in the Middle East and elsewhere will run their course.For Muslims, however, there is a history of how the bigotry,
tribalism and politics of many among us have made a travesty of God's
Word and trumped the message of Islam from its earliest years – from the
time that the Prophet's family was destroyed by Muslims to the
contemporary conflicts in which we Muslims are the ever-mounting victims
of our own malevolence.

ii.

Islam is not a new religion that sprouted in the relative barren soil
of Arabia among a people at the margin of civilizations. It is, rather,
faith in God of man – as in the Hebrew and Christian bibles – once
again renewed and restated in history that is proven, providentially, by
the role of the divine in human affairs. Prophetic history, whether in
Hebrew tradition or as related in the Quran, is "providential:" Prophets
act according to the divine instruction, guidance, inspiration and
legitimacy that come from God as the Higher Power. In other words, God
is not neutral – as is evident, for example, in the story of Moses
taking his people out of captivity into freedom; of David confronting
the enemies of his people, who have been "chosen" for their commitment,
or covenant, to worship the One God of Abraham; or, in Christian
history, in the age of the Apostles, when the foundations of Jesus's
church and ministry were first laid; or in guiding Muhammad to defeat
his pagan enemies so that monotheism would prevail over idol-worship.The history of Muhammad, as the Prophet and Messenger, was
"providential" in that sense; and what followed, as Islam swiftly spread
beyond its desert borders to become established as world religion and
civilization, was "providential" as well. The idea of "providence" in
Christian writings is usually limited to the history of Jesus and
Christianity; and in the writings of Jewish scholars, such as Abraham
Heschel, "providence" is confined to the history of the Jewish prophets.
But the meaning of "providential" can be applied to all religions.
Islam seized the imagination and devotion of a people, and propelled
them forward into the world as a new force bearing the old message of
monotheism. The manner in which events surrounding this history unfolded
was so remarkable that the shockwaves from that moment, in the early
decades of the seventh century of the Christian era, still resonate more
than fourteen centuries later.In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud's last book – published
in 1939, shortly before his death – he describes Judaism as a Father
religion and Christianity as a Son religion. We might, then, describe
Islam as a Return-to-the-Father religion. Judaism had evolved into a
strict and uncompromising monotheism relative to the Christian belief in
which the idea of One God was somewhat broken down, due to Greek-Roman
influence. Freud, an atheist, packed his last work with striking
insights as he witnessed Europe sink into a new age of barbarism. He
made one reference to Islam:

[T]he founding of the Mohammedan religion seems to me to
be an abbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, in imitation of which it
made its appearance. There is reason to believe that the Prophet
originally intended to accept the Jewish religion in full for himself
and his people. The regaining of the one great primeval Father produced
in the Arabs an extraordinary advance in self-confidence which led them
to great worldly successes, but which, it is true, exhausted itself in
these.17

Freud was not a scholar of Islam. Nor is there any indication that he
ventured into any study of it. However, he may have heard of or come
across the writings of Jewish scholars – such as Rabbi Abraham Geiger
(1810-74) or Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) – who made significant
contributions to the study of Islam and its sacred texts. The above
quote uncannily echoed a theme advanced by Geiger in his prize-winning
monograph of 1833, the title of which, in English, is, "What Did
Muhammad Take From Judaism?"18Geiger's thesis that "Muhammad in his Quran has borrowed much from Judaism as it presented itself to him in his time"19
is not strange, given the countless references to Hebrew prophets,
their stories, and the highly elevated place Moses occupies in the
Quran. Indeed, it might even be said that the Quran is very much a
Jewish text; the Jews were not merely a "people of the Book" (ahl al-Kitab), but the first
people in the Semitic tradition called upon to worship the one and only
God. The religion of the Jews and their stories were familiar to the
pagan Arabs, who had lived in Arabia for nearly a millennium before
Muhammad's time.20As Muhammad preached the message of worshipping one God – the God of
Abraham – it was only natural and reasonable that he turned to the Jews,
the Arabs' most proximate neighbors, as an example of a people
subscribing to a monotheistic faith.The pagan Arabs, however, despite the length of time the Jews had
lived among them, did not embrace the Jewish faith. Nor did they accept
Christianity, with which they were also familiar.It took a revelation from God to a man born among them, and who
belonged to them by blood and customs, to wrench them away from
polytheism and embrace the idea of one God. This was the single, unique,
Lord of Mankind – Allah in Arabic – whom Abraham is said to have
discovered; Moses is said to have spoken with; Jesus, by his miraculous
birth, is said to be the breath or spirit of ("ruh Allah" in Arabic); and whose messenger, among the Arabs, was Muhammad.Muslims believe that Muhammad did not borrow from Judaism or
Christianity, but revealed that which came to him from the same source
that the Jews and the Christians hold as truth. There is only one truth –
God's Word that there is no god but God – revealed time and again under
different circumstances to different people at different places. What
was revealed to Muhammad was this one truth in the circumstances of that
time and place in which his divinely ordained mission occurred.God's revelation to Muhammad is the Quran. For Muslims, the Quran is
God's Word. Frithjof Schuon (1907-98), a German mystic and sage of
"perennial philosophy," wrote,

The great theophany of Islam is the Quran; it presents itself as being a "discernment" (furqan) between truth and error.21

Before there was a text compiled of this revelation, there was only
the Word of God as heard by Muhammad, and it was through him that others
received the Word. Whether or not Muhammad fabricated the Quran is an
old controversy, one that surfaced even during his lifetime. The Quran
states,

[They fail to understand that] thou art only a warner,
whereas God has everything in His care; and so they assert, "[Muhammad
himself] has invented this [Quran]!"Say [unto them]: "Produce, then, ten surahs of similar merit,
invented [by yourselves], and [to this end] call to your aid whomever
you can, other than God, if what you say is true! (11: 12-13).

Fazlur Rahman (1919-88), a Muslim scholar and philosopher of
Pakistani origin, proposed that the pristine Quran was Muhammad's
divinely inspired speech collected into the Uthmanic codex – the
authorized text of the Quran compiled during the rule of Uthman, the
third caliph and companion of the Prophet.Rahman wrote,

But orthodoxy (indeed, all medieval thought) lacked the
necessary intellectual tools to combine in its formulation of the dogma
the otherness and verbal character of the Revelation on the one hand,
and its intimate connection with the work and the religious personality
of the Prophet on the other, i.e. it lacked the intellectual capacity to
say both that the Quran is entirely the Word of God and, in an ordinary
sense, also entirely the word of Muhammad. The Quran obviously holds
both, for it insists that it has come to the 'heart' of the Prophet, how
can it be external to him?22

This opinion got Rahman into such deep trouble with the orthodoxy
that he was forced into exile. But Rahman's thesis – that the Quran is
simultaneously divine and human – holds the key to explaining those
verses admonishing the Jews in polemical tones.The Quran describes itself as revelation that "makes things clear."
(15:1) Nevertheless, it is difficult to grasp the full meaning of any
divine texts. Referring to the Bible, Schuon wrote:

The seeming incoherence of these texts – for instance the
Song of Songs or certain passages of the Pauline Epistles – always has
the same cause, namely the incommensurable disproportion between the
Spirit on the one hand and the limited resources of human language on
the other: it is as though the poor and coagulated language of mortal
man would break under the formidable pressure of the Heavenly Word into a
thousand fragments, or as if God, in order to express a thousand
truths, had but a dozen words at his disposal and so was compelled to
make use of allusions heavy with meaning, of ellipses, abridgements and
symbolic syntheses. A sacred Scripture – and let us not forget that for
Christianity Scripture includes not only the Gospels but the whole Bible
with all its enigmas and seeming scandals – is a totality, a
diversified image of Being, diversified and transfigured for the sake of
the human receptacle; it is a light that wills to make itself visible
to clay, or wills to take the form of that clay; or still in other
words, it is a truth which, since it must address itself to beings
compounded of clay, has no means of expression other than the very
substance of the nescience of which our soul is made.23

In other words, how to read the Quran – how to distinguish between
what is the universal and timeless truth embedded in the particular; how
to go beyond the explicit (zahir) statements and grasp or discover their implicit or hidden (batin)
meaning; how not to misuse and abuse its allegorical language for
partisan purposes – has been disputed ever since the Prophet's demise.From the earliest discord that ruptured the community of believers
Muhammad left behind – from the sectarian conflicts, which eventually
led to the massacre of his family; to the proliferation of sects among
Muslims; to the tribal wars fought in the name of Islam, all the way to
the raging conflicts across the Arab-Muslim world in our time – the
history of the House of Islam reflects abiding disagreements among
Muslims over how the Quran is read. These differences have all too
frequently led to violence. Ironically, Islam's success in history only
exacerbated them. When recently converted Muslims, who had been pagan
Arabs, carved out a vast empire, and their tribal chiefs emerged as
imperial rulers in the manner of the Byzantine and Persian oriental
despots, politics corrupted faith.Differences among Muslims, especially the ulema [religious
scholars], also stimulated the variety and richness of Muslim learning
during the expansive phase of Islamic civilization in its first five
hundred years. The innumerable commentaries on the Quran produced during
this period indicated the need to make non-Arab Muslims familiar with
the language of the sacred text they were required to learn, and to
understand what they were reading.Yet regardless of how the text was read, the Quran – revealed in a
world filled with strife – teaches that man can find the path to repose,
equilibrium, peace, and blessings despite all conflicts, provided he
bears witness to one God. And His message is that there is no god but
Allah (what is called Yahweh [or YHWH] in Hebrew.)The word "conflicts" here refers to the generic nature of conflicts
in which man is entrapped in this world; it does not refer to particular
conflicts between Jews and Christians, Christians and Muslims, Jews and
Muslims, etc. The "peace" in this sentence, too, means the generic
peace man seeks, the peace inside oneself that leads to inner
tranquility. One who has sensed such tranquility is not caught in the
web of sectarian or inter-religious conflicts.The Quran warns, reminds, explains and provides lessons from history,
but it is not vindictive, because God, as the Quran repeatedly affirms –
in every chapter but one, as mentioned – is ever merciful. Hence, the
seeds of contemporary anti-Jewish attitudes found in the Quran should be
read, as these verses were understood when revealed to the Prophet, as
lessons to be learned when a people (in this instance, the Jews) break
the trust placed in them by God – if, for example, they work on the
Sabbath or worship a golden calf. Any disapproval refers only to those
incidents at those times in those places.The few negative references to the Jews in the Quran tell how a
segment among them in Arabia mounted opposition against Muhammad, and
how he responded. These were Jews from the tribe of Banu Qurayza,
located in Medina, who colluded with the Meccan enemies of the Prophet
and were then severely punished. Had they succeeded, it would have meant
defeat, death and the end of Muhammad's divinely ordained mission. The
particular events involving the Banu Qurayza are the only ones alluded
to. And they are elliptical, which means they may be understood with
reference to the early oral history that supplied material for the
earliest biographical sketches of the Prophet and the Hadith literature.
These, as mentioned, can themselves be weak or questionable.The universal lesson to be drawn from such references in the Quran is
that wrongdoing will result in harmful consequences. Such references
constitute parables about ethics – that no evil goes unpunished and no
good goes unrewarded.Moreover, the Jews specifically addressed in the Quran – those in the
time of Muhammad who opposed him – understood the allusions made in
these verses to their own sacred text.The Quranic admonishment, "Be ye apes, despised and rejected," that
is hurled by Muslim hate-mongers at the Jews, is found in the verse that
reads in Muhammad Asad's translation as follows:

[F]or you are well aware of those from among you who
profaned the Sabbath, whereupon we said unto them, "Be as apes
despicable!" ― and set them up as a warning example for their time and
for all times to come, as well as an admonition to all who are conscious
of God (2: 65-66).

This admonition is figurative, not literal. The Muslim hate-mongers'
"you" – Jews or others – cannot turn into "apes." Rather, the behavior
of those who have broken God's law, such as by profaning the Sabbath,
have behaved as less than human, more like an unthinking beast. God's
speech or sacred texts – as Schuon says – is in language that is figurative, unless He is commanding something explicit, such as "Thou shalt not kill."The reference to the Mosaic Law that condemns those Jews who violate the Sabbath to death in Exodus 31:1424
was also used in the Quran as a warning to those Jews who opposed
Muhammad, with a reference to their own Scripture: a reminder of what
befalls those who turn away from righteousness after God has shown mercy
to them. This lesson is also emphasized in preceding verses of the
Quran. Verse 2:62, the most significant in this section – the second and
the longest chapter in the Quran called "Al-Baqarah" (The Cow) – states
in Asad's translation:

Verily, those who have attained to faith [in this divine
writ], as well as those who follow the Jewish faith, and the Christians,
and the Sabians – all who believe in God and the Last Day and do
righteous deeds – shall have their reward with their Sustainer; and no
fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve.

In his commentary on this verse, Asad writes:

The above passage – which recurs in the Quran several
times – lays down a fundamental doctrine of Islam. With a breadth of
vision unparalleled in any other religious faith, the idea of
"salvation" is here made conditional upon three elements only: belief in
God, belief in the Day of Judgment, and righteous action in life.25

As Asad explains, this verse refers to any and all people, without
discrimination, who believe in One God and the Day of Judgment
(accountability), as well as those who do the right thing – and that
such people have nothing to fear. It is the bigots – whether Muslims,
Christians, or Jews – who turn God into a sectarian identity, as if God
is only concerned about Muslims, or Christians, or Jews. They thus turn
God into an idol. Rabbi Heschel famously wrote, "Any God who is mine but
not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol."26
Heschel was stating in a different context what Asad says in his
commentary on verse 2:62: that the message of the Quran is universal and
that the God of the Quran is universal. Hence, there is not, nor can
there be, any dispute between what is universal as stated in the Torah,
or in the Gospels, or in the Quran. Dispute arises only out of the
desire in man to particularize the universal.It is easy to refer here to Asad's translation of the Quran and the
accompanying commentary because of his excellence in both Arabic and
English, and his personal history. Asad (1900-1992), named Leopold Weiss
at birth, was a Polish Jew and grandson of a rabbi. As an adult, he
became a Muslim, lived in Saudi Arabia and later in Spain, and devoted
his life to the study of the Quran and Islam.27 In his prologue to The Message of the Quran, he wrote, "It is axiomatic from the Islamic perspective that the Quran cannot be translated, because the form
of God's revelation, that is the Arabic itself, is not merely
incidental to its meaning, but essential to it… A rendering into another
language, therefore, is not and never can be the Quran as such, but
merely an interpretation of it."Asad devoted his life to learning the Quran's Arabic, or the closest
living approximation to it, spoken among those dwindling numbers of
Bedouins of the Arabian Desert still not assimilated into the rapidly
changing world around them. These were people who had not been reached
by the "modernized" Arabic of radio and television, broadcasted from the
urban centers of the Arab world.With Asad's commentary, verse 2:62, above, bears the universal
message of the Quran. It belies any justification of Muslim anti-Jewish
bigotry; it nullifies any suggestion that the Jews, as a result of
opposition by some of them against Muhammad, are condemned as enemies of
God and the Prophet.The idea that the sins of one generation, or one individual, might be
visited upon another is explicitly rejected in the Quran by the
following words: "And no bearer of burdens shall be made to bear
another's burden." (35:18) Those who claim that this passage is
abrogated by later ones need to be reminded that a universal principle
cannot be abrogated by any jurist or political agitator. Many Muslims do
not even accept the idea of abrogation. But those who do, use this idea
for their own narrow, or bigoted, interests that neither their own
logic of abrogation nor the universal message of the Quran warrants. So
such argumentation is polemical; and polemics, by nature, are sectarian.
The Quran and the Prophet do not – cannot – sanction Jew hatred
of any sort. And though the devil can always cite the Bible for his
purposes, the ill will towards the Jews in the pre-modern world could
not be derived from the Quran.Many Muslims – followers of a faith that turned triumphantly imperial
and yet was open and inviting to non-Muslims – nonetheless viewed the
Jews negatively: as devout Muslims, they could not, and possibly still
cannot, understand why the Jews as a people did not embrace Islam.The story about the Jews of Banu Qurayza – their collusion with the
Meccans; the resistance they offered after the pagan confederates were
beaten; their surrender; and their punishment – is referred to in the
Quran briefly as follows: "…[A]nd He brought down from their strongholds
those of the followers of earlier revelation who had aided the
aggressors, and cast terror into their hearts; some you slew; and some
you made captive." (33:26)Ibn Ishaq, the first biographer of the Prophet, writing some 145
years after the events relating to the Banu Qurayza, embellished this
brief reference in the Quran by gathering together oral reports of what
presumably occurred. According to Ibn Ishaq, following the judgment of
the arbitrator, Sa'd b. Mu'adh – that the men of Banu Qurayza be put to
death and the women and children sent into slavery – Muhammad oversaw
the carrying out of the verdict. The estimates for the men killed on
that day vary between 400 and 900. The validity of this story, the
veracity of Ibn Ishaq, and the meaning of this event in relation to the
Prophet and his teaching have all been disputed.28From the present day view, the judgment seems harsh – but was it so
according to the customs of the time? Although the story of Banu Qurayza
will stand as a rebuke of the Prophet among his critics, the
explanation is neither difficult nor anti-Jewish. But this is the story
that both non-Muslim enemies of Islam use to launch their tirades
against the Prophet and Islam, and that the Islamists use to justify
their war against the Jews. The Meccans were defeated by the Prophet,
and then he turned to punish the Jews of Banu Qurayza for their
collusion with his enemies. What is disputed, as I mention and
footnoted, is what has been recorded in the earliest history of the
period written some 145 years after the events and the death of the
Prophet. The stakes were immensely high, and the leaders of Banu Qurayza
were fully aware of the potential outcomes of their actions.It seems ironic that the Jews of Banu Qurayza, a people of the Book
and monotheists, colluded with polytheists against Muhammad, who was
also bearing a monotheistic message to the pagan Arabs. But, as the
First Commandment of the Jews states, "Thou shalt worship no other god
before me," some Jews may have regarded Muhammad's entreaties as an
attempt to lure people away from their traditional Hebraic belief.
Indeed, people often harbor their own particular fears, as some have
done in our time, especially since 9/11.Muhammad was bearing the message of worshipping One God to the pagan
Arabs; just as some Jews (not all of them) did not accept Jesus, some
Jews (not all of them) sided with the pagans against Muhammad and the
message he was bearing. Those Jews were punished. For Muslim bigots to
refer to this episode in the Prophet's life and Islam's earliest history
as justification for their hate mongering against Jews is
reprehensible.From the Quran's point of view, it was providential that Muhammad
prevailed, thereby teaching a timely lesson to those still maintaining
their hostility to his message and mission. Moreover, the punishment
meted out to the men of Banu Qurayza was also in keeping with the tenets
of the Hebrew Scripture. Here reference might be made to the judgment
Moses delivered when he came down from Mount Sinai and saw his people
worshipping a golden calf sculpted out of their jewellery, engaging in
idol worship after being delivered from Egypt by God. Moses called upon
the Levites, and ordered them to draw their swords and slay the men who
had done wrong; and some three thousand were put to death.29Moses is the towering presence in the Hebrew Scripture, as he is in
the Quran. "And since we know that behind the God who chose the Jews and
delivered them from Egypt stood the man Moses, who achieved that deed,
ostensibly at God's command, I venture to say this: it was one man, the
man Moses, who created the Jews," wrote Freud.30 Muslims
revere Moses and refer to him as "kalimullah," the one who spoke with
God. The reference to Moses and the punishment he meted out to those
responsible for making and worshipping an image is relevant in
discussing the penalty carried out against the Jewish men of Banu
Qurayza. Moses's draconian punishment of the idol worshippers would
likely have been readily understood at the time by all involved in the
supposed Banu Qurayza massacre.If the story of Banu Qurayza had been so out of proportion to the
norms of the time, it would have reverberated beyond the confines of
Arabia and been reported, or at least taken note of, in the contemporary
chronicles recorded in Jewish and Christian centers of Byzantium and
Persia. Yet there is no independent record of the story of Banu Qurayza
outside of Muslim sources, beginning with Ibn Ishaq's first biography of
the Prophet.The earliest notice of Islam in Christian records is found in the History of Heraclius.
Prepared by the Armenian bishop Sebeos, it was completed around 661,
less than thirty years after Muhammad's death. In it, Sebeos recorded
that the Jews sought the assistance of Arabs in the defense of Edessa
from the Byzantines. He also referred to the Arabs as the children of
Ishmael and mentioned that Muhammad preached to them about the God of
Abraham and the connection of Islam's origin to the Jewish faith. Sebeos
made no mention of Banu Qurayza, or of any other event or matter
relating to Islam that displayed Arab hostility to the Jews. Instead, as
John Moorhead noted: "Sebeos' evaluation of Islam was positive."31Arabs defeated the Byzantines, captured the area known as Palestine,
and took control of Jerusalem, which was surrendered to the Arab armies.
Jews of the region celebrated the fall of the Byzantines. This is
because the Jews had been driven out by the Roman ancestors of the
Byzantines when the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem,
slaughtered the Jews, and exiled the rest out of Palestine in the first
century of the Christian era. Since that time, the Jews had been kept
out of Jerusalem by the Romans, who later came to be known as the
Byzantines once the Roman Empire split into two, the Eastern Roman
Empire (Byzantium) and the Western Roman Empire. With the fall of
Jerusalem to the Muslims in 638, Jews were allowed or invited by Muslims
to re-enter and reside in their holy city. The Jews viewed this as
positive change for their own situation in the land of their ancestors.
Such a receptive attitude by the Jews towards Arabs would have been at
best odd, even scandalously hypocritical, if they had known about Banu
Qurayza. This indicates that the story was probably not known to the
Jews outside of Arabia, and the Jewish celebration of Arab victory over
the Byzantines meant that the Jews did not view the Arabs as negatively
as they did the Byzantine Christians who held them responsible for the
crucifixion of Jesus.As W.N. Arafat has indicated32, until Ibn Ishaq narrated,
and very likely embellished, the event surrounding the Jews of Banu
Qurayza, there was no mention of it other than the Quranic reference
that might have alarmed the people outside of Arabia. Yet there was no
such alarm; and the Jews, despite their long tradition of recording
events that affected them for good or ill, did not record it.Are there any lessons in such events as recorded in scriptures beyond
the generic rule that men are answerable for their deeds? For believers
in God, history can be providential; and yet even the prophets made
mistakes. King David, for instance, was an adulterer, and also accused
of committing murder. Moses was rebuked for his errors and, as a result,
never entered the Promised Land with his people after fleeing Egypt.
There are episodes in Muhammad's life, too, when he was rebuked, as in
the story in the Quran when he ignored the blind man who came to him for
comfort. Jesus was tempted by devils. We are all, therefore,
accountable for our errors on the Day of Reckoning. Lesser men should
not presume to act as divine agents. In Islam revelation came to an end
with Muhammad as the last of God's prophets, and any Muslim claiming to
emulate the Prophet, or to act as if he has God's sanction, is simply
presumptuous and delusional. Aspiring to piety, righteousness, and
devotion to God's message is the only form of emulation of the Prophet
to which Muslims, as mere mortals, may aspire. To suggest that an
individual can judge, punish, or wage war on others on the basis of the
argument that he is emulating the Prophet is presumptuous and delusional
– regardless of claims to the contrary, such as those made by Iran's
ayatollahs or Sheikh Qaradawi.It is this presumptuousness and delusion that fill the minds of the
intemperate and self-described "jihadis" or "holy warriors" in the ranks
of Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Hamas, the Taliban, and others who
selectively seize hold of verses from the Quran as sanction for their
violence. Islamists in recent years have prioritized the Quran's Chapter
9 – "At-Tawbah" or "Repentance" – as God's sanction to wage war on the
infidels, including the Jews and the Christians. The verse, variously
known as the War Verse or the Sword Verse, invoked by Islamists, reads
as follows (in Asad's translation):

[And] fight against those who – despite having been
vouchsafed revelation [aforetime] – do not [truly] believe either in God
or the Last Day, and do not consider forbidden that which God and His
Apostle have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth [which
God has enjoined upon them], till they [agree to] pay the exemption tax
with a willing hand, after having been humbled [in war] (9: 29).

According to the Franco-Tunisian scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb, this
verse was "invoked, for example, by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA)
terrorists who massacred the monks of Tibhirine in Algeria in 1996. The
same verse is said to grant religious legitimacy to the suicide bombers
in Israel. The same reference may well have been involved in galvanizing
the criminals responsible for the horrifying attacks on September 11,
2001, in New York and Washington, D.C."33There is little that can be done to prevent those Muslims and their
hate-mongering teachers, such as Hasan al-Banna, Syed Qutb, Khomeini,
Qaradawi or Mullah Omar, from citing the Sword Verse or similar ones as
an excuse to justify violence. However, the traditional exegesis of
Chapter 9, which contains the Sword Verse, was overwhelmingly one of
caution. As Asad notes, "It must be read in the context of the clear-cut
Quranic rule that war is permitted only in self-defense."34
Here it should be noted that the wars Israel fought since 1948 were
largely defensive and, therefore, consistent with the Quranic
directives. If any of the wars Israel fought against Arab states and
terrorists had ended in a loss, it would have been an existential defeat
for the Jewish state.Moreover, within the Muslim community, the authority responsible for
initiating war in self-defense must also be legitimate, or seen to be
legitimate, by a majority of Muslims. Only a properly constituted
authority can declare war, engage in war, and bear the consequences of
war. Since the Prophetic era ended, the arc of Muslim history has had to
cope with a crisis of legitimacy. This crisis deepened with the end of
the Caliphate – the only properly constituted authority according to
traditionalists in Islam. The resulting void created is at the heart of
the immense conflict raging between those Muslims holding authority, as
for instance in Egypt, and Islamists, who do not recognize these Muslim
rulers as legitimate and are at war with them. For the Islamists these
Muslim rulers are illegitimate – as was President Anwar Sadat of Egypt
murdered by them – as they hold and promote values contrary to their
"jihadi" (holy war) ideology, and their goal to re-constitute the
Caliphate or, at a minimum, a Shariah-based state.During the age of Islamic expansion in the early centuries of Islam,
the Sword Verse was invoked to justify instituting the exemption tax or jizya
on the Jews and the Christians living among Muslims. But that period of
Muslim history ended a long time ago. In the post-Caliphate age, the
historic religious-political challenge for Muslims lies in constructing
the basis of a legitimate order consistent with democracy, freedom,
human rights, gender equality, and science. The universal message of the
Quran that would assist Muslims to meet this challenge is not found in
the verses Muslim fanatics extol; it is found in those verses that these
fanatics seek deliberately to downgrade, or even go so far as to
declare abrogated.The Sudanese reformer, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, proposed the universal
message of Islam was yet to be fully understood by Muslims. Taha saw the
modern age as a propitious time for Muslims to begin to appreciate the
universality of Islam and proceed to a comprehensive reform of Shariah.
Taha explained his views in The Second Message of Islam. His
message was built around the proposition that there is a natural
progression in Muslim understanding of the Quran that obligates the
Prophet's followers to evolve in their thinking to grasp the universal
message revealed to him. Taha was hanged for this "apostasy" in 1985, by
the regime of Sudanese dictator President Gaafar Numeiri.Taha's execution illustrates the immense peril faced by Muslim
reformers. Reform of Islam means, in effect, either reforming the
Shariah code – the corpus of Islamic laws derived from the Quran; the hadith or traditions of the Prophet and the ijma or consensus of the ulema
[religious scholars] – or setting it aside entirely and beginning
afresh in the light of a modern legal-political philosophy, hermeneutics
[the theory of textual interpretation], comparative religion, theology,
and cosmology.In Sunni Islam, to which the overwhelming majority of Muslims belong,
the Shariah is a fixed and inviolable code of laws, based on the
accumulated wisdom, knowledge and consensus of the ulema from the classical period of Muslim history during the first three centuries of Islam. The need for ijtihad, independent reasoning, which scholars had used to formulate the Shariah, was declared closed by a consensus of Sunni ulema either in the twelfth century, after the death in 1111 of Al-Ghazali, the revered scholar-jurist turned mystic35,
or, at the latest, in the thirteenth century, following the sack of
Baghdad by the Mongol armies in 1258. The Sunni leader, the Caliph of
Islam, held, as urged by the Sunni ulema, that there was no more need for ijtihad
because there were no new insights to be added to the existing corpus
of laws. Consequently, Muslim scholars were obligated to replace
independent reasoning with taqlid, or imitation, in the
application of the Shariah. As Robert Reilly has shown, this closing of
the Muslim mind effectively doomed Islamic civilization once Europe
emerged from its own relative state of backwardness into making the
modern world.36The prerequisite to the reform of Islam, as Taha maintained, requires
reading the Quran anew, in keeping with the spirit of the age in which
people live. The Quran, which is literally God's Word to Muslims, cannot
be a closed or frozen text with a fixed meaning, determined by the dead
weight of men from another time long gone. The necessity of reading the
Quran with fresh eyes and insight is, understandably, threatening to
the orthodoxy, the Islamists, the defenders of the status quo and to all
Muslims who dread or disapprove of change and openness in closed
societies.A reading of the Quran that relies only, as Islamists insist, on the
explicit and literal meaning of the text will fail to see the essential
unity of the Quranic message, due to the prevalence of apparent
contradictions scattered across the text. It is only by openness to
reading the Quran as a text with a hierarchy of implicit meanings that
Muslims can be prepared to understand and set its universal message
apart from the subsidiary meanings in the text.In the surah/chapter "Al-Maa'idah" or "The Repast" (Chapter 5 in the
Quran), we read, "O You who have attained to faith! Do not take the Jews
and the Christians for your allies" (5:51). Like the Sword Verse in
Chapter 9, this is another favorite passage of Islamist and
fundamentalist Muslims. It happens that "Al-Maa'idah" is one of the last
chapters of the Quran revealed in Medina sometime after the Prophet's
farewell pilgrimage, a decade after the hijra (flight) from Mecca
to Medina, or in the tenth year of Islam. This chapter also contains
the verse declaring: "Today have I perfected your religious law for you,
and have bestowed upon you the full measure of My blessings, and willed
that self-surrender unto Me [al-Islam] shall be your religion" (5:3).
As we read further in "Al-Maa'idah," we come across, "[V]erily, those
who have attained to faith [in this divine writ], as well as those who
follow the Jewish faith, and the Sabians, and the Christians – all who
believe in God and the Last Day and do righteous deeds – no fear need
they have, and neither shall they grieve" (5:69). Thus what we have in
"Al-Maa'idah " – revealed after the Sword Verse found in
"At-Tawbah" – is an earlier, negative, reference to the Jews and the
Christians that is then set aside by the inclusive and clearly stated
universal message."[I]t is here," according to Meddeb, "that the ethical vocation
becomes the criterion for salvation, beyond any consideration of belief
in any so-called true religion."37 It is here, too, and even
more importantly, that the Quran's universal message nullifies the angry
rigidity of fanatical monotheists (be they Muslims, Christians, or
Jews) who insist their religion is the only true belief. And to
emphasize this universal message – so that there is no mistaking that
ethical conduct is the measure of the quality of faith – the Quran
states in "Al-Maa'idah" that differences among faiths exist by heavenly
design:

Unto every one of you have We appointed a [different] law
and way of life. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made
you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to
test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with
one another in doing good works! Unto God you all must return; and then
He will make you truly understand all that on which you were wont to
differ. (5:48)

Moreover, according to the methodology of traditional exegesis, the
Sword Verse is abrogated by the relevant verses of "Al-Maa'idah." This
principle of abrogation (naskh) was developed by early Muslim
jurists as a remedy for apparent inconsistencies in the Quran, by giving
precedence to a verse revealed later over one revealed earlier. As Carl
Ernst explains, the "harmonizing approach acknowledges a chronological
dimension to the unfolding of the Quran, as is evident from the
traditional labelling of suras as belonging to the earlier Meccan period
or the later Medinan period."38 While both "At-Tawbah"
containing the Sword Verse and "Al-Maa'idah" were revealed in Medina,
the latter was revealed in the final year of the Prophet's life and,
consequently, takes precedence over the former. And while the idea of
abrogation is faulty, as Asad argued39, and goes against the spirit of the Quran, as Taha proposed40,
it remains a traditional methodology in Islamic jurisprudence – which,
by its own reasoning, must conclude that the Sword Verse was abrogated
by the universal message reiterated in "Al-Maa'idah."Thus, in spite of the fact that Islamist hate-mongers habitually
insist upon the principle of abrogation when it serves their purposes
and void it when it does not, there is no justification even in
pre-modern times for anti-Jew bigotry among Muslims in Quranic
references to the Jews. In explaining Muslim Judeophobia in pre-modern
history, then, we are left with the pathology of tribalism and tribal
conflicts that have remained with Muslims to this day.

iii.

Violence is not specific or limited to Islam and Muslims. It is
embedded in what Immanuel Kant called "the crooked timber of humanity" –
adopted by Anglo-Jewish philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin as a motif of his
work – that religion, ethics, moral philosophy, and education seek to
remedy. On the basis of psychoanalytic theory, Freud explained that
civilization is coercion writ large. The "replacement of the power of
the individual by the power of a community," Freud wrote, "constitutes
the decisive step of civilization."41 Violence is contained,
repressed, and re-directed as civilized life evolves. According to
Freud, the grand project of civilization may only be realized, if at
all, at some future date, when men shed their illusions about "religious
ideas in the widest sense" and bring about a re-ordering of relations
that would make coercion unnecessary, leading to its renunciation.42Freud held that civilizations differ as a result of the specific
history of each people and what recourse they have sought in striving
for a legitimate and just socio-political order. Islamic history stands
apart from that of the Jews and the Christians by the manner in which
its founding drama unfolded, and in its emergence as a global power
within the first century after Muhammad's death in 632. The speed with
which the frontiers of Islam spread at that time seems to have fostered
among Muslims a deliberate forgetfulness of the tribal conflicts and
violence that shaped the future of Muslim history with its interminable
violence, and the reliance on authoritarian politics as the means by
which to contain it.Like the Hebrew Scripture, the Quran is filled with general warnings
about man's forgetful and ungrateful nature, and his disposition to
follow the instincts of his lower self. But there was also a specific
warning to the Prophet about the tribal Arabs who, after having been
finally defeated in their campaigns against him and his followers, came
to swear allegiance to him in person. The relevant verse is as follows:

The Bedouin say, "We have attained to faith."Say [unto them, O Muhammad]: You have not [yet] attained to faith;
you should [rather] say, 'We have [outwardly] surrendered' – for [true]
faith has not yet entered your hearts." (49: 14).

Beyond its concrete warning, the verse also underscores the dangers
posed by hypocrites. Though eventually exposed by their conduct, the
damage they render in the meantime can be immensely costly.The dispute over leadership of the Muslim community at the time of
the Prophet's death marked the beginning of the war within Islam. Those
involved were companions of the Prophet, yet they displayed an
insufficiency of belief or rightful conduct by their intemperate
behavior, which ignited wars and violently severed the unity of the
believers in Islam. This blood-soaked history has haunted Muslims from
their earliest times to the present.43Tribalism remained deeply embedded among the first generation of
Muslims among whom the Prophet was born and to whom he brought Islam.
Political power passed into the family of the Prophet's most ardent foe
when Abu Sufyan's son, Mu'awiya, seized the Caliphate after the murder
of Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law. Mu'awiya founded the Ummayad
dynasty, based in Damascus. His son, Yazid, approved of the murder of
Muhammad's grandson, Hussein – the son of his only surviving daughter
Fatima, married to Ali – when he asserted his claim to succeed his
father as the Caliph. Hussein was brutally killed in Kerbala, Iraq, in
680, by Yazid's men. His body was disfigured by horses made to trample
over it, and his severed head was carried at the point of a lance to the
Caliph's palace. In her account of the killing of Hussein and the great
schism in Islam based on the earliest Muslim sources, Lesley Hazleton
writes:

As with the death of Christ, the death of Hussein soars
beyond history into metahistory. It enters into the realm of faith and
inspiration, of passion both emotional and religious.44

But Hussein's murder was also much more; it was a crime of such
proportion that Muslims buried their grief and shame within themselves
even as they became divided. A minority became partisans of the family
of the Prophet through Fatima and her sons, Hasan and Hussein, and came
to be known as Shi'a. The majority, known as Sunni, preferred to accept
the authority of the Ummayad dynasty rather than deepen further the
violent tribal discord that had seized the rapidly growing Muslim
community. The Sunni majority came to look down on the Shi'a minority as
responsible for perpetuating discord and undermining the unity of the
believers, while the actual crime of the massacre of members of the
Prophet's family was set aside as too painfully self-incriminating to
confront.The pathology of violence among Muslims and against non-Muslims might
be traced back to the wars and tribal conflicts culminating in
Hussein's murder. In Moses and Monotheism Freud wrote:

We must not forget that all the peoples who now excel in
the practice of anti-Semitism became Christians only in relatively
recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion. One might say
they all are "badly christened"; under the thin veneer of Christianity
they have remained what their ancestors were, barbarically polytheistic.
They have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which
was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from
which Christianity came to them. The facts that the Gospels tell a story
which is enacted among Jews, and in truth treats only of Jews, has
facilitated such a projection. The hatred for Judaism is at bottom
hatred for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the German
National Socialist revolution this close connection of the two
monotheistic religions finds such clear expression in the hostile
treatment of both.45

Freud touched a raw nerve that is readily inflamed in speculating on
the origins of genocidal European anti-Semitism. This hatred was
imported into the Middle East, and Muslim anti-Jew bigotry, present from
pre-modern times, "Islamized" it.Though there was no basis for or record of the sort of anti-Judaism
in Islam or among Muslims that existed beneath the "thin veneer of
Christianity" in Europe, the phenomenon of "badly christened" Christians
has its parallel in the Islamic history of Bedouin Arabs, who outwardly
accepted Islam but "without faith entering their hearts," just as the
Prophet was warned.The lesson from the Quran's reference to Bedouin Arabs might well be
true of Muslims in general; their hypocrisy is writ large across the
Muslim world, despite repeated warnings about it in their sacred texts.
And despite their forceful conversion and repression in the war against
apostasy launched by Abu Bakr after the Prophet's death, the Bedouin
Arabs have remained unreformed in their customs.The Bedouin mentality seems to have left its pagan mark on the body
politic of Islamic civilization – beneath the "thin veneer of Islam."
Bedouin culture is the ultimate expression of tribal culture, of tribe
against tribe, which we are witnessing now in Syria and elsewhere in the
Arab-Muslim world. Bedouin culture does not and will not recognize
"individual" thought or preference as legitimate or as taking precedence
over the collective values of the tribe. Hence, there will not and
cannot be any acceptance of universal values above the particular
values, or idols, of the tribe. Bedouin culture may thus outwardly
reflect the universality of Islam, as in Saudi Arabia, but it lacks an
inward acceptance of the universality of Islam as presented in this
paper. Bedouin culture, therefore, will be at war with anyone and
everyone seen as an outsider. This could mean Christians, Jews, Hindus,
Baha'is, and even more so Muslims with similar views to mine.Again, such a sense of tribal envy and superiority is contrary to the
teachings of Islam. It is always convenient to find an excuse to blame
others for our own failings as Muslims, and to look for some conspiracy
on the part of outsiders supposedly working against us. This consists of
idealizing the notion of Muslim unity, while denying the bleak reality
of our own, self-generated tribal conflicts.The world of Islam stretches far beyond the Arab region, or the
Middle East, with its diverse ethnicity of Afghans, Arabs, Berbers,
Kurds, Iranians, Turks and more. The largest concentration of Muslims is
in South Asia; the largest Muslim country is far from the Middle East,
in Indonesia. Most Muslims outside the Middle East have little or no
personal contact with Jews, and only know of them through the lens of
the religious-based history that they were taught in the confines of
their local religious schools and mosques, devoid of any critical
assessment or inquiry.In modern times, Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism has been exported from
the Middle East to the wider world of Islam, and it is basically
religious propaganda sweetened by the largesse of petrodollars. Just as
non-Arab and non-Middle Eastern Muslims defer to Arabs on Islam, so they
have also readily absorbed, without questioning, the entire filth of
anti-Semitism propagated by Arab hate-mongers. The result is the
deplorable extent to which Muslim Judeophobia, fused with genocidal
European anti-Semitism, has become part of contemporary Islam or
Islamism.Islamism is a pathology propelling a significant segment of the
global Muslim population into conflict with others – most prominently
the Jews – all of whom are viewed as enemies. What seems like an inner
compulsion of Islamists to wage war has also historically turned into
Muslim-on-Muslim violence: a raging sectarian conflict of Sunnis against
Shi'ites, tribes against tribes, and nations against nations. Islamists
have shredded their "thin veneer of Islam" and displayed their "jihad"
as a neo-pagan belief in a capricious tribal god governing a cult of
violence. It was from such a pagan belief that Muhammad sought to lift
the Arabs of the desert by having Islam bear the universal message of
belief in one God, merciful and compassionate; but it is precisely this
pagan cult of tribal violence that Islamists have resurrected or which,
it might be said, they never entirely renounced.The world at the end of the twentieth century was not prepared to
encounter Islamism as an ideology of hate and terror. The terrorist acts
of war unleashed by Islamists on September 11, 2001 came as a shock.
Since that day, the world has been informed about Islamists and now
needs to recall from history how violence born of Jew-hatred or
anti-Semitism does not end with the Jews; nor is it only about the Jews.
Anti-Semitism was, and remains, a plague that endangers us all. There
is an urgent need to quell, rather than appease, Muslim anti-Semitism.
The suicidal acts of terrorism, in which Islamists have engaged before
and since the 9/11 attacks, demonstrate their willingness – should they
acquire the weapons – to bring about their own version of Götterdämmerung in their fanatical and pagan desire to destroy the enemy. The world stands warned.

Note: A version of this paper was read at a meeting of
the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP)
at McGill University, Montreal, in December 2013.

Endnotes

1. See EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, Discrimination and hate crime against Jews in EU Member States: experiences and perceptions of anti-Semitism. November 2013.2. Robert S. Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger. The American Jewish Committee, 2002.3. See David Pollock, Beyond Words: Causes, Consequences, & Cures for Palestinian Authority Hate Speech. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2013 (available as pdf document at www.washingtoninstitute.org).4. See, for instance, David D. Dalin and John F. Rothmann, Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam. New York: Radom House, 2008.5. Neil J. Kressel, "The Sons of Pigs and Apes": Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence, p.1. Washington, D.C, Potomac Books, 2012.6. Ibid., pp. 3-4.7. Ibid., p.4.8. Ibid.9. See references to the Jews by Khomeini in Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini. Translated and Annotated by Hamid Algar. Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981.10. Wistrich, op. cit., p. 4.11. See B. Tibi, Islamism and Islam, p. 56. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2012.12. Ibid., pp. 55-56.13. Wistrich, op.cit., p. 5.14. B. Lewis, "The New Anti-Semitism," in The American Scholar, Winter 2006.15. B. Lewis, "The New Anti-Semitism," in The New York Review of Books, April 10, 1986.16. See Clinton Bennett, In Search of Muhammad. London and New York: Cassell, 1998; also Tarif Khalidi, Images of Muhammad: Narratives of the Prophet in Islam Across the Centuries New York: Doubleday, 2009.17. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 118. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.18. Geiger's monograph was translated into English by F.M. Young in
1896 in Bangalore, India, and published two years later. This same
edition was re-issued as Judaism and Islam (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1970).19. Geiger, Judaism and Islam, p. 1.20. See Gordon D. Newby, "The Jews of Arabia at the Birth of Islam," in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, pp. 39-51. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.21. Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam, p. 39. Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom Books, Inc., 1994.22. F. Rahman, Islam (Second Edition), p. 31. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979.23. Schuon, op. cit., pp. 40-41.24. See Exodus (31:14), "Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it
is holy unto you: everyone that defileth it shall surely be put to
death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off
from among his people." The Bible, Authorized Version. Bible Society, Stonehill Green, Westlea, Swindon. Printed in Great Britain.25. Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Quran, p. 21, footnote 50. Bristol, England: The Book Foundation, 2003.26. A.J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence, p. 86. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.27. See "Berlin to Makkah: Muhammad Asad's Journey into Islam," by Ismail Ibrahim Nawwab in the magazine Saudi Aramco World, pp. 6-32, January/February 2002.28. See, for instance, W.N. Arafat, "New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina," in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 2 (1976), pp. 100-107; and M.J. Kister, "The Massacre of the Banu Qurayza: A re-examination of a tradition," in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, Vol. 8 (1986), pp. 61-96.29. See Exodus, 32: 26-28.30. Freud, op. cit., p. 136.31. See John Moorhead, "The Earliest Christian Theological Response to Islam," in Religion (1981), vol. 11, pp. 265-274.32. See Arafat, fn. 28.33. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Islam and the Challenge of Civilization, p. 14. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.34. Asad, op. cit., p. 295, footnote 40.35. See, for instance, Sadakat Kadri, Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari'a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World, pp. 99-105. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.36. See Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010.37. Meddeb, Islam and the Challenge of Civilization, p. 30.38. Carl W. Ernst, How to Read the Qur'an: A New Guide, with Select Translations, pp. 16-17. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.39. See Asad, The Message of the Quran, footnote 87, p. 31.40. Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, The Second Message of Islam. Translation and Introduction by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1987.41. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 47. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961.42. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, pp. 7-8. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961.43. See Wilferd Madelung, The succession to Muhammad: A study of the early Caliphate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Also see Lesley Hazleton's book based on early Muslim sources, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split. New York: Random House, 2009.44. Hazleton, op. cit., pp. 191-192.45. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, pp. 116-117.Salim MansurSource: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4364/arab-muslim-antisemitism Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.